3QQ's: Michael Doherty on Shakespeare

America's hardest-working actor answers questions about the Bard.

Welcome to Three Quora Questions, our series of interviews in which a guest expert joins me to field strange and interesting questions posed on Quora.com (the internet’s oddest knowledge repository).

If you’ve never seen Michael Doherty onstage, you’re not going to enough plays. I’d wager that on a list of every actor in America ranked by their number of live theatre performances over the last ten years, Michael slots somewhere in the top 100. He’s plied his trade off-Broadway, at major regional houses like the Guthrie and Berkeley Rep, and he generally spends each summer in residence at the Utah Shakespeare Festival — including right now, where he’s appearing in The 39 Steps and The Winter’s Tale.

Given that Michael’s frequent Shakespeare Festival appearances have made him Southern Utah’s biggest celebrity this side of Joseph Smith, I decided to ask him some questions about the man himself, William Shakespeare. Michael quickly agreed, describing himself as a bonified “Shakes-pert.”

Let’s see if that knowledge stands up to our questions from Quora. As always, these are real questions from real people — and there’s a special bonus question at the end that I couldn’t resist forcing Michael to answer.

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What is your review of William Shakespeare?

MICHAEL: What a weirdo, you know? I think he gets a lot of credit for being incredibly subversive and ahead of his time, but the more I scrutinize his work, the more I realize it is impossible to determine his opinion. I just saw The Taming of the Shrew the other day, and I was like, his take could either be “the patriarchy is fucked up,” or, you know, “women should really toe the line.” It could really go either way. And I believe scholars could even argue over what he's trying to say with literally every piece of writing he ever made.

So, my hot take is that there is no discernible read on the dude and any of his opinions.

How would today's world be different if William Shakespeare had never been born?

MICHAEL: Well, here's what I like to ask myself: I'm working at the Utah Shakespeare Festival right now, so what would the equivalent be if there wasn't Shakespeare, you know?

There is a George Bernard Shaw Festival in Canada. There is a Neil Simon Festival here in Cedar City, Utah. But I like to imagine what the other, even more diluted versions of that could be. I don't want to go too obscure here. I was going to say the Larry Shue Festival. That feels a little too niche. But I feel like you can insert any number of punchlines here that would be the weak-ass equivalent.

Have you ever used Shakespeare to roast somebody?

MICHAEL: Well, what's coming to mind is in Shakespeare class in college, [our teacher] would print out a bunch of Shakespearean insults. Like, a column of adjectives and a column of nouns. And we would go back and forth and trade barbs. Pretty weak. Nothing that really stung too much.

Actually, I've been working on a play that is a companion piece to a Shakespeare show, and I've been Googling Shakespearean insults a lot. Nothing really cuts to the quick in a very contemporary context without getting incredibly vulgar. Like, “canker blossom” just doesn't hit anymore.

BONUS Q: Was Shakespeare black?

MICHAEL: I feel like I'm walking into a minefield here, Greg… I think it's an important question to be asking.